"Blow Up: Inflatable Contemporary Art," which closes this weekend at the Elmhurst Art Museum, is not about current events. Despite the difficulty of writing about anything disconnected from the political crisis facing this country, it remains reviewable. Art gains context from the world around it. Inflatable art, literally filled with the atmosphere, is no exception.

The show, which originated last year at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, Calif., and has been traveling to small regional museums amid popular acclaim ever since, includes handmade, machined and customized sculptures filled with air. Why air? An artist determined to make something truly enormous but who wishes to avoid breaking the bank or the doorway of the gallery may find it more amenable than traditional mediums like marble, concrete, wood or plaster. The invisible gaseous substance surrounding the earth is abundant, nearly weightless, free or almost, and adaptable to most sizes and shapes. It fills up fabric or plastic shells with the help of a fan or a pump, then collapses down to something relatively small and light, easy to ship, store and install.

Air also proves surprisingly poetic. The dozen artists included here have harnessed the ether to challenge the history of painting, meditate profoundly on life and death, play with androgyny, poke at machismo and more. The lighter the form, the heavier the content.

The earliest work on view in "Blow Up" is by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the couple famed for temporarily wrapping bridges and parliament buildings and even entire coastlines with fabric. In 1968, in a sprawling park in Kassel, Germany, they succeeded after two failed attempts in raising the largest inflatable structure ever fabricated without a skeleton. Picture a white twist lollipop 280 feet tall. Video documentation reveals "5,600 Cubicmeter Package" to have been as absurd as it was impressive and unfathomable. The zeppelin — or, at least, a zeppelin balanced vertically on its nose — may have been its closest relation, in ambition as well as appearance.

Fast-forward to the dawn of the decorative inflatables and bouncy castle age, from which much of the rest of the artwork in the show draws technique and inspiration. As if to prove that point, the first gallery is filled with products by Fatboy, a maker of stylish beanbags based in Coppell, Texas. For $299 anyone can buy "Big Dog," an 8-foot-tall balloon animal made out of PVC that looks like a poor man's version of Jeff Koons' stainless steel balloon dog sculptures. A few years ago, one of Koons' 10-foot-tall pups sold for a record $58.4 million, making it the priciest piece by a living artist ever sold at auction. There's so much trickling up and trickling down in "Blow Up" that it's a wonder the floors are dry.

Next come some in-between items that are part artwork, part product. A pair of cute bop bags named "Super Malfi," smiley polka-dotted blobs with arms, appear courtesy the good-feeling hipster art collective FriendsWithYou. Another two come from the artist Nick Cave and feature pictures of his Soundsuits on either side. They're available for purchase in the gift shop and they left me confused: If the original Soundsuits exist as a counter to racial violence, what would it mean to put their image on a punching bag? Perhaps it's a test of the user.

The rest of the show ranges from a room stuffed full of Claire Ashley's gargantuan, irresistible stuffed paintings to Billie Grace Lynn's delicate, noble white elephant, laboriously constructed from translucent nylon and layers of chiffon. Neither of these projects strike me as being much changed by the events of Nov. 8, nor do Momoyo Torimitsu's towering pink plastic bunnies, so gigantic that the ceiling of McCormick House has them doubled over, like a children's fantasy gone haywire.

The same cannot be said for the remaining artworks, which though not intended to reflect the massive shift of America's political reality somehow do.

Patrick Flibotte's gargantuan superheroes, an 18-foot-tall dynamic duo, hover overhead and, by virtue of being faceless, genderless and lacking any insignia, promise nothing much at all. That feels horribly noncommittal right now, as it surely didn't when Flibotte constructed them by hand in 2007. Guy Overfelt's puckered, bulging replica of a 1977 black Trans Am, an ironic puncture of American machismo when it was made in 1999, today seems sadly inadequate; irony will no longer be nearly enough, not to combat the aggressively masculine egos about to occupy the White House nor little else. Lee Boroson's "Live Rock," a playful cluster of tubular, frilly and bulbous shapes meant to suggest an artificial reef, suddenly looks like a harbinger of rising, plastic-filled oceans to come. Joshua Allen Harris' trash and deli bag creatures, which he animates by attaching them to subway exhaust vents, at least have always known what litter was capable of.

Then there is Lewis deSoto's 26-foot-long golden Buddha, closely based on a 12th-century sculpture carved into a hillside in Sri Lanka. "Paranirvana (Self-portrait)" depicts the deity reclining on his deathbed. If the artist hadn't put his own likeness on the sculpture, it would be easy enough to stretch out on a nearby bench, which has a tufted pillow eerily similar to one resting under the statue's head, and hope to wake up when it's all over.

Finally comes "Birth Death Breath," an opera by Diane Christiansen and Jeanne Dunning that is the glorious, weird, fragile heart of the show. A chorus of snowmen and woodland creatures, some of them surrealistically altered, others looking as if they came right from Wal-Mart, inflate and deflate while a recorded libretto gives them voice. They sing solemnly of hunting and melting, survival and sadness, and every time they go down they endure a little death. And then, eventually, they rise up again, given new air.